A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most...
Solnit (A Paradise Built in Hell, 2010, etc.) considers the nature and purposes of storytelling in a series of elegantly nested meditations.
The author begins with 100 pounds of apricots, picked from a tree outside the home her Alzheimer’s-stricken mother can no longer safely inhabit. Canning this abundance of perishable fruit to preserve it, Solnit begins to think about the ways in which the stories we tell arrest time; her musings on decay and death gain greater urgency when she learns that she has a potentially cancerous condition that requires surgery. In “Mirrors,” she recalls that telling stories was a vehicle for her mother’s deeply conflicted views about the past; their relationship was fraught, and Solnit escaped from constant criticisms and resentments into the solace of books. Yet “books are solitudes in which we meet,” she insists, repeatedly using the word “empathy” to characterize the essential quality needed to create stories that express our common humanity. Solnit co-opts Georgia O’Keeffe’s wonderfully evocative phrase “the faraway nearby” to specify the delicate balance between distance and closeness that enables this process of reaching out through storytelling. She employs a series of chapter titles that serve as both metaphors and precise physical descriptions—“Ice,” “Flight,” “Breath” and “Wound”—to propel her narrative into the central “Knot.” In it, she is operated on, “then sewn shut with thread and knots,” prompting her to expatiate on Greek mythology’s ancient image of human life as a thread winding through a labyrinth. “Unwound” begins the process of re-using previous chapter titles to give them new meanings as Solnit recuperates in Iceland, and the text moves toward a final consideration of those apricots as “a catalyst that made the chaos of that era come together as a story of sorts.”
A provocative, moving mélange of personal confession and intellectual inquiry—another sui generis work from one of our most stimulating essayists.Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-02596-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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